Democrat NY Governor Andrew Cuomo Touts his Dismal Record

Movie mogul Harvey Weinstein turned himself into the court in New York City on Friday morning to face multiple charges of rape and sexual abuse.

Nikitas3.com watched the event live on the internet. I was expecting him to arrive in a Rolls-Royce or a million-dollar Mercedes, but he arrived in what looked like a modest Mazda SUV.

Hmmmmm…. I wondered what that was all about?

He exited the car carrying three books.

Hmmmmm… What is that all about?

And he was wearing a sport jacket, a white shirt, had an open collar and a powder blue sweater over the shirt. He looked like a confused bum not a mega-famous movie mogul.

Nikitas3.com believes that the whole arrival was highly scripted. Rather than showing himself off as a swaggering Hollywood mogul in a glittering limousine, Weinstein appeared disheveled. This all was probably meant to offer an image of him as a humble man, not a power broker who had exploited women in the most vicious ways.

What about the sky-blue sweater? When reporters were in short sleeves?

Well, since Nikitas3.com is an artist and has studied color, I feel that the sweater color was meant to “soften” Weinstein’s image in news photos and even to make him look ‘grandfatherly’.

When Rudy Giuliani was elected as the get-tough mayor of New York City in 1993, one of the first things he did was to order the cops to stop wearing their powder-blue shirts and stop driving powder-blue cop cars.

The new shirts were black, as were the cop cars, to offer a more menacing appearance.
Weinstein probably was playing a “color game” with his sky-blue sweater.

One of the books turned out to be a biography of the famous theater composer duo Rodgers & Hammerstein. The other was about Elia Kazan, whose testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952 exposed communists in Hollywood. The third book was not identified.

Nikitas3.com believes that the books were also a prop to throw the media off of the reason that Weinstein was headed to court.

Good try, Harv… Your props may work in Hollywood, but not on the streets of New York.

Now here is today’s main commentary:

New York’s ultra-liberal Democrat governor Andrew Cuomo is running for a third term this year. He is expected to run for president in 2020.

First elected in November 2010 Cuomo has presided over the economic decline of the state which started decades ago and accelerated under Obama.

Hundreds of thousands of jobs, along with more than 1 million of New York’s younger, skilled and educated population, have fled the state over the last 25 years as New York moved further and further to the Democratic left.

The Empire Center reports about the decade from 2000 to 2010:

For a second consecutive decade, New York’s net population loss due to domestic migration was the highest of any state as a percentage of population.

Cuomo recently said to tout his re-election bid, “This state has done more for its people in a shorter period of time than any other state”.

He is backhandedly correct. Cuomo has helped to expand the welfare state more than any other governor in America. So indeed more of its people (poor blacks, hispanics and urban whites, illegal aliens, other dependents, elderly, sick, overpaid government workers, etc.) indeed are better off. Meanwhile the hard-working, tax-paying people of the state are doing worse. Many are voting with their feet.

New York was once one of the wealthiest states in the world and one of the thriving centers of the American economy for 200 years. And while New York City is still doing fairly well, the rest of the state is not. Nikitas3.com has seen this first-hand since I live near the New York state border and go over there from time to time.

Even rich people are packing up and leaving New York City in reaction to its high tax rate. Most go to Florida which has no state income tax or city tax. The statewide New York sales tax is now a whopping 8.25%, adversely affecting every citizen. Gasoline taxes are sky-high. Property taxes and business taxes have gone through the roof.

Public spending is out of control and corruption is too, most of it attributed to Democrats from the cities. Cuomo’s top aide was recently convicted of corruption, as was the former Democrat speaker of the state assembly Sheldon Silver. The state’s Democrat attorney general Eric Schneiderman recently resigned in a sex scandal as did the state’s Democrat governor in 2008, Eliot Spitzer.

At the same time Cuomo and his ‘green’ cronies have blocked all types of economic development and will force the closing by 2021 of one of the state’s major electricity producers, the Indian Point nuclear plant.

They have banned the lucrative natural gas business which could be doing great economic good for New York state’s hard-pressed rural counties, full of conservative white people, along the Pennsylvania border. Those counties sit atop one of the richest natural gas deposits in the world called the Marcellus Shale (estimated reserves of up to 600 trillion cubic feet of gas).

Cuomo is a major advocate for open borders and for funding every service to illegal immigrants, and is currently in the process of granting voting rights to convicted felons through executive action (pardons), not through legislation. Look at this from Fox News:

A cop killer recently released from prison will get another added benefit of freedom: the right to vote.

Herman Bell, 70, who served 44 years in prison for the murder of two New York police officers in the 1970s, was granted parole last month by the state parole board. But a fresh decision by New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo to issue conditional pardons to more than 24,000 parolees means Bell can vote in the upcoming election.

“How could he do something like that? This is a convicted felon. He killed police officers in New York,” Dianne Piagentini, the widow of one of the murdered officers, said on “Fox & Friends” Friday, noting Bell was “tried and convicted” and given “25 years to life” in prison.

This is why New York state has more and more dependent people, and a struggling population that is older, poorer and sicker as the younger people flee, particularly the rural areas.

When you think about thriving, optimistic places in America with policies that welcome economic growth you think about conservative places like North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Idaho or Texas, but certainly not New York.

New York state is really two places. New York City and its suburbs, at the southern tip of the state, is called ‘Downstate’ and is very liberal. It has about half of the state’s population. ‘Upstate’, with its small towns and huge rural expanses including the 6.1 million acre Adirondack State Park, is pretty conservative except for the big population centers like Albany, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo.

The state assembly and state senate are pretty evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. But the Democrats are far-left and the Republicans are fairly moderate and have been for decades. The last Republican governor was moderate-liberal George Pataki, who left office in December 2006.

Since then Democrats have become even more partisan, pulling the state to the extreme. Cuomo is the worst. He not only has pushed every racial, social and economic button but he even openly maligned conservatives saying, “Who are they? Right to life, pro-assault weapons, anti-gay — if that’s who they are, they have no place in the state of New York because that’s not who New Yorkers are.”

He even has called for the elimination of tipping in restaurants. You may wonder what this means, but the reason is two-fold.

*Cuomo wants all restaurant workers to get a $15 an hour minimum wage, which he also is promoting statewide. This ostensibly would eliminate wage discrepancies between waiters/waitresses and others like dishwashers and kitchen staff, i.e., make everyone “the same” (socialism).

*This plan would turn all restaurant workers into salaried employees, and thus easier to unionize.

Most waiters and waitresses oppose the Cuomo plan since they can earn $30 or $50 an hour or more in good times. Most restaurant owners also oppose the plan since they would have to pony up large amounts of cash for the higher minimum wage for all of their workers. Marginal restaurants would simply close.

But this, friends, is socialism writ large. Once one of the most prosperous places on earth, Cuomo and company are reducing New York state to a glum, pessimistic place. New Yorkers are generally neutral or negative about the state’s future.

Fortunately a good Republican named Mark Molinaro is running against Cuomo this year. While polls show Cuomo winning easily, don’t be so sure. Molinaro is running against Cuomo’s statist economic policies and against the corruption, issues that most New Yorkers freely admit are major problems. Nikitas3.com predicts that Molinaro can win over enough independent voters, and even some sensible Democrats, to become governor.

Meanwhile here is just one single story from CBS New York about the conditions in New York City under its super-permissive far-left mayor:

From a crackdown on K2 overdoses on Brooklyn sidewalks, to syringes littering a Bronx park, New York City’s drug crisis has been on full view this week.

… City workers were seen yesterday cleaning Saint Mary’s Park in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, looking for the needles and drug paraphernalia scattered about for anyone to come across.

Over in Brooklyn, the drug problem is more driven by the resurgence of a dangerous batch of K2 synthetic marijuana that left the NYPD dealing with more than 50 overdoses and at least a dozen arrests over the weekend. People were literally stumbling all over the street.

… “People don’t care,” said Abdullah Freeman, a resident of Mott Haven. “As long as they doing their thing, it’s going to continue.

This is the dire situation that existed throughout the 1970s and 1980s that Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor in 1993 to solve. He did so. Now the city is backsliding.

Another loser in the “socialist paradise” is Illinois. Like New York state, Illinois is largely rural and conservative but its politics are dominated by its major city Chicago, one of the most corrupt places in America and the home of Obama and Hillary Clinton.

We all know that Chicago is a disaster. But so is the whole state of Illinois as a result of the power of Democrats statewide that comes primarily out of Chicago. Look at this from Breitbart News:

Illinois is losing more citizens than nearly every other state, and according to reports, the biggest reason citizens are leaving is that they can no longer afford to live in the Land of Lincoln.

… one of the major reasons to seek a change of venue is because the state is simply taxing them out of their homes, according to Chicago’s WGN TV.

According to reports, Illinois alone lost 33,703 citizens to outward migration last year. In 2016, the state lost another 37,508 people. A report by the Chicago Tribune also noted that Chicago has been a net loser of its citizens for the last three years running. And the surrounding county was also a net loser of its population.

Indeed, Chicago is unique in the U.S. for being the only major city that has consistently lost citizens over the last five years. The Tribune’s editorial board even published an editorial saying that it no longer makes any sense to live in Illinois.

… One Chicago couple who moved to Tennessee told WGN that the move gave them back an amazing 25 percent of their income that would no longer be lost to property taxes and other expenses associated with living in the deep blue state of Illinois.

Best-selling author Brad Thor, who calls himself an “economic refugee,” told WGN that he fled Chicago to stop “aiding and abetting” the city’s corruption.

With so many leaving Illinois, it is no wonder that moving van Line company United Van Lines ranked the state as number one for outbound moving vans.

Thus the picture is clear. These are the defiantly liberal states that are withering – California, Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Illinois.

Under Democrat governors Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio also were floundering but then their tough-guy Republican governors, elected in 2010 and re-elected in 2014, turned those states around.

Now here is some distressing information about our public school system from CNS News:

The New York City public schools spent $24,109 per pupil in fiscal 2016, according to data released today by the US Census Bureau.

That ranked New York City No. 1 in per pupil spending among the nation’s 100 largest public school districts, according to the Census Bureau, and was more than twice the nationwide per-pupil spending in public elementary and secondary schools, which was $11,762 in fiscal 2016.

Meanwhile, in those same New York City public schools, 72 percent of the eighth graders were not proficient in reading and 72 percent were not proficient math, according to the results of the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress tests released by the U.S. Department of Education.

The Boston public schools spent $22,082 per pupil in fiscal 2016, ranking Boston No. 2 in per pupil spending among the nation’s 100 largest school districts.

In the Boston public schools, according to the NAEP results, 68 percent of eighth graders were not proficient in reading and 67 percent were not proficient in math.

Wow. $24,109 per student in 2016 for abject failure. This is socialism in a nutshell. The more money you give them, the worse they do.

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